Sutures (Mark Sloan x OC)

Chapter One- The Beginning

Today's my first day at Seattle Grace Hospital as a surgical intern. I wake up at 5am have a shower and after deciding I look good enough for my first day, I drive to work. It takes a few hours as my apartment is a 2-hour drive from the hospital. I finally arrive at the hospital at 8am and the size of the place is overwhelming, I feel chills run down my spine as it finally hits me. I have made it, not all the way but close enough. All those years at Harvard Medical have finally paid off. I quickly make my way to the surgical floor after following all the signs on how to get there. I spy another group of interns looking like lost sheep, that must be how I look to. A man appears out of nowhere and announces he is Chief Webber (Chief of Surgery), he tells us to follow him into OR1. The rooms bright and you can smell the sterilised equipment, it is euphoric, and I try really hard not to freak out. He starts to talk and all eyes land on him.

"All of you start to day hopeful, wanting in on the game" he says, making a circle around the room. "Today you are the doctors, the sevens years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to your breaking point. Look around you, say hello to your competition". I quickly scanned the room and the faces of those among me and all I could think was some will be my friends, others I will never know at all and some will become people I cannot stand. This really is a competition.

He continued "Eight of you will switch to an easier speciality, five of you will crack under pressure and two of you will be asked to leave". As the chief finished his speech, one question was truly eating away at me. Who will be my resident?
I made my way to the lockers with the other interns, and we all started to get changed into our light blue scrubs.

"Reid, O'Malley, Simons, Jacobs your with Dr. Grey" said a voice from behind me. I quickly finished changing and walked to meet my new resident. She is standing at the front desk with her back to us, she looks nice.That's a start.

"I have 5 rules. Memorise them." She explains "Rule number one, don't bother sucking up I already hate you and that's not gonna change." She starts to point at the desk "Trauma protocols, phone list, pagers". As she continues to talk, we each grab one of every item. "Nurses will page you. You answer every page at a run. A RUN!" She starts walking away and we each follow as quickly as possible. "That's rule number two, your first shift starts now and ends in 48 hours" she says as we walk over bridge "you are interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain. You run labs, write orders, work every second night until you drop and don't complain". She opens the door to a room "the on-call room. Sleep where you can when you can,you know? But not with anybody. Not attendings. Especially not attendings. Sleeping with attendings, not a good idea." She says as if she's speaking from experience. "where was I?" she asks us.

I reluctantly reply, "Rule number four?"

"Oh yeah, if I'm sleeping do not wake me unless a patient is actually dying. The dying patient better not be dead when I get there because not only would you have killed someone, you would have woken me for no good reason." She replies.

A boyish looking man raises his hand "That was four rules, you said there was five."

She starts to move "Rule number five when I move you move." Then her pager beeps, she quickly looks, no more than a second later and she's running through the hospital. We all start to run with her, remembering rule number two. She starts shouting everyone to move out of her way, but it seems to have little to no effect. She's not very authoritative. Which reminds me, she forgot to tell us her name. A man starts to walk next to me.

"Her names Meredith Grey." He states.

"Oh, Thanks. I'm Anastasia Rogers but just call me Ana" I reply

"No problem and my names George. Meredith's a friend, she's not that bad once you get to know her" He says starting up a conversation.

"You're friends with a resident. How did you do that?" I question.

"well...it's my second year being an intern. I failed my exam last year so, I have to re-do it all over again" He answers sadly.

"That must suck." I stated.

"Yeah, I hopefully I won't fail this year" He said hopeful.

"Fingers Crossed" was all I could think to say. I feel bad for George having to re-do his internship it must be hard, at least he'll have some knowledge to pass over. Maybe he can even help me.

We arrive at the pit; it's swarming with patients. I overhear the nurses talking about a mass car crash, several traumas are coming in. Meredith assigns each of us to a task, I got sutures. Which is fine, I guess. So, I make my way of to a woman who has a gash across her forehead. I grab a stool and start to remember the procedure for stiches. I get the suture kit ready and I'm about to start stitching up her forehead when a man appears behind me blocking my light.

"Do it like that and you'll leave a horrible looking scar. Do you want to ruin her face?" I couldn't work out if it was a rhetorical question or not. So, I didn't seem obligated to reply.

Without turning around, I said "And who exactly are you?"

"Mark Sloan, Head of Plastic Surgery. You must be one of the new interns. Who told you, you could sew up that women's forehead?" Shit. An attending, If I'd have turned around, I would have noticed the dark blue scrubs.

"My resident assigned me to do sutures. Meredith Grey.If You have a problem take it up with her. I'm just following orders." I stated rather rudely. I really should just stay quiet; I'm digging myself a deeper hole here. A shadow of a smile appeared on his face and disappeared so fast I wasn't sure it was there at all.

"Well then, I'm just going to have to show you how to sew up a wound probably. Oh, and once we're finished sewing this poor woman up, you can run down the coffee cart in the lobby and get me a bone dry cappuccino".
Okay seriously who does this think he is? Without saying another word, he took the suture kit from me and started to close the wound on the woman's forehead. I looked closely at his movements whilst he was suturing, how the needle when in and out of the skin. I tried to keep my attention on his suturing, but my eyes kept getting distracted by the muscles in his arms. Damn!

Once he finished with the woman's wound, he handed me 10 dollars. Did he really expect me to get him a coffee? I'm a medical student not a personal assistant. I gave him a bored looking expression as if to express my thoughts to him, but it did little, and I caved.
As I made my way to the coffee cart in the lobby, I started thinking about how I went from surgical intern to coffee girl in 0.001 seconds. I am partly to blame I shouldn't have caved but I'm a weak person and I can rarely ever say no.
God, how am I going to become a surgeon?